Short Paper 1st draft

Frank DiMaria

Grammar For Everyone

                         “Equate rhyme with reason, Sun with season”

As I begin my professional career as a teacher, I contemplate all the facets of what it actually means to be a teacher in a classroom. While a wide variety of ideas jump into my mind immediately, the one that sticks out the most is making a connection with my students and forming relationships with them - showing them I care. With this in mind, first things first, I need to be able to communicate with my students, and not only communicate with them but understand their “home language.”

I’ll confront the reality head on in saying I come from a predominantly white, upper middle class suburban center. The idea of bilingual education, or even hearing Ebonics in the classroom was not on my mind at all starting off as a teacher. But, now as I move along in my career, I am interested and aware of the discussions in education revolving these terms, and the dire need for me as a future teacher in New York, a multicultural epicenter, to embrace and incorporate my students home language in my own classroom. In The Skin We Speak, Judith Barker offers, “Home English or dialect, which most students learn at home, and recent immigrants often from peers, and which for first and second generation immigrants may be a combination of English and their mother tongue.” Essentially, a home language or dialect can best be understood as the language a person most feels comfortable using. For the sake of this conversation, I want to look at Ebonics or African American English, specifically to examine how some teachers feel about embracing it in a classroom and then address using spoken word poetry as a way of doing so.

Erin J. Quinn offers the insight that, “Many African American students, particularly those residing in large urban centers, are speakers of African American English (AAE), a linguistically rich, rule-governed variety of English that contributes in part to the cultural identity of individuals in the African American community.” In the New York City classroom I’ll be teaching in soon, a predominantly urban area, I can expect to have African American students in my class. Though I personally cannot understand what it means to be an African American, I can at least embrace a home language in my classroom that an African American student may be comfortable with. Lisa Delpit says, “All people have the right to their own language. We cannot constantly correct children and expect them to continue to want to talk like us.” (32) I cannot expect my students to change whom they are, a home language being part of their construct, to appease a façade of what “standard English dialect” sounds like.

If I truly want to embrace who my students are, I cannot correct a student for using a home language or code switching. Instead I need to embrace and respect what they are doing as it would help them to become more comfortable with the classroom setting. Delpit offers an interesting point to consider in this conversation, “The even deeper secret was that even those of us who had acquired the “standard dialect” still loved and used aspects of Ebonics all the time.” Even if I taught my students that “standard dialect” was correct, they would still want to use and have the need for Ebonics anyways. Why not incorporate Ebonics into the classroom and embrace the idea? As Delpit makes more clearly, “Student don’t identify with the teachers who question their intelligence or with a curriculum that ignores their existence.” If I am constantly telling my students that their home language, the language of comfort, is wrong, I will never be able to connect with my students.

I consider Barker’s words strongly; “I begin by building upon a firm respect for each students home language - languages which, after all, are what most of us need to express connection and affection with friends and family, and what we draw upon for much of our art and cultural expression.” In teaching, teachers are faced with the challenge to develop a curriculum that is truly student centered. So, how do I make my classroom student centered while embracing home dialect and Ebonics? Ebonics is a language based in tradition of rhythm and sound and expressive movement. It reflects ethnic celebration and becomes an art form if truly listened to. There is a stereotype that exists which deems Ebonics as unfit and “non-standard,” and some teachers argue there is no place for it in the classroom let alone the real world. I could not disagree more to the idea of Ebonics not having a place in the classroom, and if looked at with an open mind, Ebonics is in essence poetry. All the attributes of African American English reflect that of a lively, emotionally driven, well written poem - Spoken Word.

According to Shiv Raj Desai and Marsh Tyson, spoken word poetry is “a form of poetry that utilizes the strengths of our communities: oral tradition, call-and-response, home languages, storytelling and resistance. Spoken word poetry is usually performed for an audience and must be heard.” I think of poets like Saul Williams, or rapper Common, who implore such techniques through their art. Lines like, “We do hereby declare reality unkempt by the changing standards of dialogue/Statements, such as, “keep it real", especially when punctuating or anticipating modes of ultra-violence inflicted psychologically/or physically or depicting an unchanging rule of events will hence forth be seen as retro-active/and not representative of the individually determined is,” can be heard in Saul Williams’ Coded Language. The lines tell a story and are barbaric yelps crying out for a place to be heard. Williams demonstrates the African American English language and implores a code switching technique to reach a level of comfortableness in expressing feeling. If I showed my students Williams’ poetry and had them write their own to present, I would not only be embracing who my students are, creating a student centered environment, but I would be also teaching them that there is a place for them to be whom they are and what they want to be.

If students opened up through this method, “this proves to be an opportunity to understand the context in which our students are coming from. Once we can familiarize ourselves with the struggles our students grapple with internally, both in and outside of school, we can connect with them on a more human, personal level. More importantly, by simply listening to our students and creating a space where they can begin to articulate their thoughts and ideas in written and spoken form, we can further assist them in developing a love for written and spoken word.” My goal as a teacher must, and will be to truly listen to my students. Spoken word poetry not only allows students to write, speak, and perform in a comfortable way, it also allows me, the educator, to understand a different culture, a different language, and who my students are and can be inside and out of the classroom.

Works Cited

Delpit, Lisa D., and Joanne Kilgour. Dowdy. The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts on Language and Culture in the Classroom. New York: New, 2008. Print. PGS. 31-59. Barker, Judith.

Desai, Shiv Raj, and Tyson Marsh. "Weaving Multiple Dialects in the Classroom Discourse: Poetry and Spoken Word as a Critical Teaching Tool." Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education 9.2 (2005): 71-90. ERIC. EBSCO. Web. 13 Sept. 2011.

Erin J. Quinn, et al. "African American English-Speaking Students: An Examination of the Relationship between Dialect Shifting and Reading Outcomes." Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research 52.4 (2009): 839-855. ERIC. EBSCO. Web. 13 Sept. 2011.